Preventing Campus Sexual Violence

Abstract

To reduce campus sexual violence, administrators must work with faculty experts in structural inequalities to develop, implement, evaluate, and share structural-level policy interventions.

Policy whiplash: How California Title IX coordinators navigated local, state, and federal policy changes during the Trump administration

“…Other research has noted similar variation in institutional type (e.g., university size, 2‐ vs. 4‐year) in such areas as the designation and availability of Title IX officers (Richards, 2016), public posting of policies and definitions of consent (Graham et al., 2017), compliance with state and federal mandates (Karjane et al., 2002), and reporting processes and outcomes (Richards et al., 2021). State policies rarely address these institutional variations, nor do they attend to campus‐level factors that shape sexual assault prevalence and Title IX response, such as the availability of campus services and resources, a campus culture of binge drinking, the dominance of athletics and fraternities, or the degree of residentiality (Gleckman‐Krut et al., 2022; Hirsch & Kahn, 2020; Moylan & Javorka, 2020). Student worker unionization efforts—for graduate students in the UCs (Noah, 2022) and the recent bid by CSU students to form the largest non‐academic union of undergraduate workers in the country (Miller, 2023)—may constitute further system distinctions that impact state policy implementation and practice.…”

“…Strong leadership at a university system level, one that involves careful study of the problem and review of “best practices” with resident experts, coupled with a transparent, inclusive review process like that undertaken by President Napolitano of the UC system in 2013, offer instructive examples of how universities can enact their own campus policies in an equitable, evidence‐based way. Others have similarly called for campus‐specific, structural‐level policy interventions that better attend to the variation in social organization of campus life that would more accurately inform sexual assault policy and prevention measures at the state and local level (Gleckman‐Krut et al., 2022).…”

“…On May 6, 2020, the OCR released its Title IX Final Rule that became legally binding 3 months later on August 14, 2020 (U.S. Department of Education, 2020). The proposed regulations, which reduced IHEs obligation to respond to reports of sexual misconduct and created additional barriers to reporting and participating in the adjudication process, prompted immediate response, and litigation from civil rights organizations, survivor advocates, and researchers (e.g., ACLU, 2020; Gleckman‐Kurt & Bedera, 2017; Holland et al., 2020). The new Title IX rules included changes such as 1) enabling IHEs to choose either a “clear and convincing” or “preponderance of evidence” standard, 2) requiring a presumption of innocence on the part of the respondent, 3) requiring adjudication procedures to include live hearings, during which each party's advisor—who may be an attorney—can cross‐examine witnesses and involved parties (Anderson, 2020), 4) removing timeline requirements for Title IX investigations, 5) ensuring an “equitable investigation” process whereby a respondent be provided details and sufficient time to prepare a response (Mangan, 2017), and 6) restricting the definition of sexual harassment, detailed as unwelcome conduct that a reasonable person would find so severe, pervasive and offensive (previously or ) that it denied equitable educational access (Gersen, 2020).…”